On Tuesday 22 August 2006 09:43, Clayton wrote:
After some Grief with the Suse 10.1 packaging tools, i bit the bullet and installed Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org) on my laptop.
I've done the same over the last couple of days.... mainly because the childish and petty "people" on this list were annoying me to the point I was ready to drop SUSE and never look back... but that's another story... and not somethign I want to get into.
That was my second reason for trying Kubuntu, but i didn't want to say it because my first mail was provocative enough as it was without such a statement ;).
What Suse does RIGHT:
SUSE does a lot of things right and it really starts to show once you load in a different distro.
With 8 years of experience with Suse (err... SUSE), i think i hit all of the major "right" points in my original post. As i mentioned there, "i couldn't make this comparison before" because i was blinded by my one-distroness. Until i tried out Kubuntu, i couldn't compare suse with much of anything.
The install worked, and I had a "working" system, but... the installer did NOT identify my CPU properly. I got the default i386 kernel instead of an SMP kernel... and no word on 32 or 64 bit kernels... so... no CPU detecting going on at all. SUSE does this right every time.
i expected this to be the case on my laptop and was actually surprised to find that it did install an SMP kernel (the laptop is a dual-core).
I had to install Synaptic seperately - Adept was installed... but not as easy to use as Synaptic.
i find just the opposite - i tried Synaptic and found that it looks too much like Yast. Adept has a gracefully simple interface, by comparison. Not only that, but i have this deep-seated hatred of Gnome and GTK-based apps, so i'll always choose a non-GTK alternative when possible.
but even though there is almost 20,000 apps available, some of what I consider the "most basic" 3rd party apps are not there
True, but the installation tools (Synaptic/Adept) are so simple to use and search through that choosing your apps takes very little time. i found this to not be a hindrance. Although i had to spend some time installing emacs, make, gcc, flex, etc, it went MUCH more quickly than it would have with yast.
- as they are with SUSE and the 3rd party app maintainers (namely Guru and Packman)
And the first time the 3rd party maintainers get tired and quit, Suse won't have multimedia support.
xorg.conf file, but the Ubuntu guys have modified the layout to something do unrecognisable that I've yet to convince it to accept my montior settings). SAX2 wins out big time on this.
i got lucky - my monitor works out of the box. Granted, if it hadn't, i'd have been up a creek because i haven't had to manually configure a monitor since... since... i started using suse. i would have to start googling to find out how to fix it.
Where Ubuntu gets it right is the simplicity. The package manage is already there... it's PRECONFIGURED with the correct online repositories and... 3rd party repository settings are there... disabled by default, but already there. When you enable them, you are clearly informed that they are 3rd party repositories and unsupported etc.
Whereas suse users first have to subscribe to a list like this one to get the list of repos. ;)
SUSE on the other hand comes with YAST... which works great if you want to install stuff off the DVD, but without a lot of background understanding... is a big blob of mystery to a new user when they want to add other repositories - and the SUSE Wiki is totally useless on this subject... there's info there, but it's so cryptic that it may as well be a recipie for beef stroganoff.
Amen.
- Yast's software management is simple to use and effective but *incredibly* slow compared to apt-based tools. Orders of magnitude
You don't notice this until you install something in (K)Ubuntu. There... the install happes so quickly, I was left wondering... did it install something?
LOL! When it installed gcc in under 10 seconds, i did just that - double-checked to make sure it was really there.
For me... the annoyance created by the childish idiots who think they are list police was almost enough to drive me away from SUSE...
The solution to that is not to drop the distro, but to unsub from this list (or any list with abusive/bullyish posters - and there are lots of them here). Or just get in the habit of pressing DELETE based on the subject line of the mail. e.g., anything with "Post Nazis" gets automatically deleted here, if for no other reason than its overly-provocative subject line.
what got me looking elsewhere. But in the end, I was reminded that despite it all, SUSE is top of the heap when it comes to Linux.
In many areas, yes, but not in package management.
If we/Novell can get the zmd/rug foolishness sorted out and find some satisfactory solution to the 3rd party apps thing, SUSE will win every time.
We've been assured several times by on-list developers that the system is being completely reworked, so us bitching about it won't help much more. -- ----- stephan@s11n.net http://s11n.net "...pleasure is a grace and is not obedient to the commands of the will." -- Alan W. Watts